House of Lords report concludes attribution practically impossible

Having banged on about this subject for years (for example see this earlier post), and having long argued that the various claims of attributable quantified impact made by many projects and researchers (they know who they are and they should be ashamed of themselves) are methodologically unsound, and having consistently said that the sections of the DCED Standard related to attribution and the so-called "Universal Impact Indicators" should be dropped because they are plain wrong... it is quite gratifying that  two of the conclusions of a report published today by the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee on the Economic Impact and Effectiveness of Development Aid are:

"We accept that accurate measurement of whether or how much aid helps promote growth is not available."

and

"32. The difficulties of accurate measurement and attribution, and of assessing what would have happened if no aid had been given, are so formidable that the evidence that aid makes a contribution to growth in recipient countries is inconclusive."

And of course, what is true at a macro-level is also true at a micro-level. It is simply not possible to measure impact attributable to a given market development project in any meaningful way, and it is certainly not possible to aggregate the impact of projects across programmes. If anyone can prove me wrong on either of these points, I would be delighted to learn about their methodologies!

So finally, can we bring some common sense to development impact reporting? Can we stop producing over-elaborate spreadsheets that calculate pseudo-scientific results? Can we stop publishing seemingly scholarly case studies that make indefensible claims that a specific intervention had a quantified poverty reduction impact? Can we stop even talking about these Universal Impact Indicators, and discard the claims that they can be calculated for each intervention and then aggregated across programmes by different donors?

In fact, let's ask about how much time and money and effort has been wasted on this subject all because some rather over-confident people made some rather foolish (but very attractive) claims about what they could do with numbers, but then didn't have the courage to admit that they were wrong...

Or maybe the noble Lords and all of the eminent folk that gave evidence to the Economic Affairs Committee have got it all wrong? In which case, can those who promote an opposite line come out and explain the methodology they propose for calculating their "robust" results?

I suspect that they won't because they can't.

So please, let's just take a step back and look to see if interventions are working, instead of getting lost in assumptions multiplied by other assumptions, adjusted for another assumption, and then claiming that we have evidence of impact!

I have always said that we should talk about the strength of the contribution of an intervention to a particular observed development outcome (for which it is possible to gather meaningful evidence), this is so much more sensible than trying to quantify that contribution.

The report says loads of other very sensible things, but this really caught my attention! For what it is worth, I say well done and thank you to the Committee. Let's hope that something good comes out of their work.